SpikeSource to expand India ops

P P Thimmaya, TNNApr 9, 2007, 03.15am IST

BANGALORE: SpikeSource, a US-headquartered open source technology company, is looking at expanding its operations in India. This would see it raising the headcount at its R&D centre in Bangalore from 50 to 100 by the end of this year. The company, which began operations in 2003, opened simultaneous R&D centres in US and India.

SpikeSource CEO Kim Polese said currently its R&D team is distributed evenly between US and India but over a period a time, Bangalore will be its largest centre globally. Bangalore will also be the hub for SpikeSource in the Asia Pacific region. The company plans to set up satellite development centres in other parts of Asia.

However, Ms Polese said it remains a challenge to recruit people in India on two counts: open source technologies is still not very popular and the growing demand for IT professionals.

SpikeSource, which has received $36 million of two rounds of funding from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, Fidelity Investments and Intel Capital, will be investing significant portion in India.

The company is looking at a major foray into the Indian market, where it is finding a greater acceptance for open source technologies. Ms Polese said the small and medium business (SMB) segment will be driving the business, followed by the government. The company has already set up a sales and marketing team.

Open source technologies has been gaining momentum in the marketplace where even the biggies like Sun Microsystems, Oracle, IBM have been coming out with these solutions. SpikeSource also has an alliance with Intel.

Ms Polese said despite the dominant presence of proprietary software, open source has been gaining acceptance as it is proving to be cost effective and reliable. However, support & services has been an area of concern for this technology and this has seen the open source community and companies building a stronger eco-system.